Company of Heroes freezes on loading mission

[AniThyng]

I just got this game, but my enjoyment of it is being hampered by a terrible snag - every time i enter a mission or load a game, it will crash to a blank screen and sound loop after the "Press any key" part of the loading, UNLESS i load the performance test beforehand. Nothing short of a hard reset will bring the system back.

Atfer i load the performacne test and let it run for a couple seconds or so, the game will then run normally until i exit to desktop and reload it again.

this is with patch 1.2

My CPU/GPU are nowhere near overheating, drivers are mobility catalyst 6.9

specs:
Core 2 T5500, 1 GB ddr2, 256MB X1400

Anyone else here encountered this issue?